You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world,” said Vladimir Putin.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is getting really popular and powerful. It’s more than a buzz though. It’s been used in several industries but its use in customer service has been phenomenal. Businesses use AI to augment human customer service agent and tremendous results are being recorded.

For example, the IBM AI-empowered platform for businesses, Watson, helped Autodesk speed up their customer response time by 99%. This is critical because customers want to be serviced 24/7.

Besides, 75% of customers already believe it takes too long to reach a live agent. Giving them a 24/7 service with AI-empowered live chat agent is a big boost and puts you ahead of your competitors.

AI Changes the Way Businesses Respond to Customer Queries

Realistically, customer service live chat agents can handle one request at a time. That means you need to get more staff as your customer base grows. However, with AI-driven live chats, you will save on hiring more staff and allow your live chat to answer basic questions.

Of course, when the question becomes complex, the chatbot with its natural language processing ability will map the customer to the agent to help solve the problem easily.

So you no longer have to keep your customers waiting. With AI-powered chatbots done well, brands can now say they offer 24/7 and actually deliver on their promise.

AI Personalizes the Customer Experience

One of the most important benefits we get from Artificial Intelligence-driven customer services is they provide customer’s behavioral insights on the fly. Yes, these insights combined with machine learning can aid businesses to deliver a customized customer service experience.

Normally, it should take you a lot of time to combine all the data and match them with your customer’s behavioral pattern. It's a lot easier with AI, machine learning, and natural language processing.

As an example, Dynamic Yield helps companies such as Sephora, Urban Outfitters, and Under Armour to build actionable customer segments with an effective implementation of machine learning.

A recent study by Infosys shows that 59% of customer’s buying decisions are influenced by personalization.

It Makes Big Data More Accessible

With this information you will not only be able to create content that will resonate with your customers and increase sales, you will be able to make informed decisions that will move your business forward.

What value is data if it can’t be used effectively to improve your business? AI allows you to make maximum use of your data to learn about your consumers so you know the best way to relate to them.

An AI-empowered customer service chat bot integrated into your CRM software can leverage the data gathered from the customers to automatically generate a report which will help you in refining your lead nurturing strategy to move your prospects to the bottom of the sales funnel quicker.

Oxygen Initiative was able to cut cost significantly and was easy for his team to understand customer’s history after deciding to integrate an AI-driven chatbot and a CRM.

Delivers a Reliable Service, Wherever Customers Need it

It's no news that Artificial Intelligence provide high-end reliability which humans can't guarantee. For example, chatbots are free from any form of ill health; neither do chatbots turn up to work late after a hangover.

A chatbot can be developed such that it doesn't get angry and creates no room for argument with a customer.

More so, an AI customer service will trigger calls immediately to the manager in case issues arise that are beyond its control. For example, if a customer's query seems complex, the AI system can be programmed to trigger a call to the appropriate expert to give the customer a human response.

With all of these in place, the customer service agent interaction with customers can be improved and of course, this will generate repeat business when customers are happy.

According to a study by Zendesk, 42% of B2C customers purchased more after a good customer service experience. Sadly, 52% of customers stopped buying just after one bad customer service interaction.

Demand for Self-service Options

Today’s customers want customer service on their terms. Customers are smarter now because of the availability of information on the web. Actually, businesses are doing a great job of teaching customers what a great customer service is all about.

In fact, a recent study revealed that 72% of millennials believe a phone call isn't the best way to resolve their issue. This is also true for customers who use IT products. They are smart people and want to get the best out of their time and money. Waiting in the queue for a human customer agent to attend to them is a waste of their precious time, causing most millennials and IT business’ customers to now avoid customer service options that require a human interaction and prefer to use a self-service option instead.

This is also true in my case, I will only call a customer service when all self-service options such as FAQ, forums, chatbots, and so on are exhausted. Yet, without a solution to my problem.

The truth is, the future generation will want to be even more self-reliant than we do now. Any forward-thinking brand will definitely want to adjust to fit into the future and stay relevant. Otherwise, it will affect your consumers negatively and harm your bottom line.

You Train Your Bot Only Once

It takes a lot of money and time to hire and train staff. If you want to use call centre service, it's even more expensive because on average, it costs about $4,000 to hire a call center service agent and up to $4,800 to train them.

That price is not static though it can increase as your customer base expands. Using AI-empowered customer service agents can be the solution to this as most of them come pre-programmed with an industry based knowledge base. Training it further is equally important.

AI-driven customer service has changed customer service in the IT industry a great deal. It will get better with time though. Soon, artificial intelligence will get to the stage of approximately human intelligence. It’s still going to take a long time to get to that point.I don’t also agree with Elon Musk that Arnie and Cyberdyne will destroy our planet. And contrary to what people think of AI as coming to replace human, that’s not true. They are here to augment human efforts.